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Wednesday, 24 April 2013

The Fictitious Uprising - Listed Professions

Listed ProfessionsIn a previous post, I examined a list published by the European Platform Against Windfarms - comprised of 'professionals' who have expressed concern about wind farms. In that post, I looked at how their numbers are skewed towards countries that are Anglophone in nature - indicating that their concerns are related to a communicated, rather than physical, phenomenon. Let's have a look a their distribution across professional lines. The list is comprised of 78 total professionals. 41 of these have the term 'Dr' in their title. Not all of these are going to be medical professionals, though - I went through the list and did my best to identify those who are classified as health practitioners:There seems to be 33 listed professionals that could be considered health practitioners - 8 'Rural medical practitioners', 6 'Ear Nose & Throat Specialists', and 5 'Medical practitioners', and a few others.

The WHO estimates there are approximately 59,000,000 health workers worldwide. Thus, we can obtain a rough percentage of the number of health workers who have expressed concern about wind turbine syndrome. 33/59,000,000 is 0.00006%

An angry refrain often directed at Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University, is that he is not qualified to comment on the wind farm health issues, as he is trained in sociology:

"As an academic discipline, sociology has never overcome the accusation of being either stupendously obvious or stupendously absurd. Chapman’s Postulate illustrates the latter."

"Simon Chapman (Think healthy on wind farms, Monday March 18th) is not a medical doctor, but a sociologist"

"He is a Sociologist and surely is not in a position to know how to run valid experiments that need Scientific and medical evaluation?"

"On what grounds, as a sociologist, rather than an acoustician or a medical practitioner, do you disagree with Leventhall’s expert testimony "

A few professions from EPAW's listing:

My next post will be looking specifically at Australian doctors - what they state publicly, and what percentage of the Australian medical workforce they represent.